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Books: The most readable righter of wrongs
Minette Marrin detects some tabloid tastes at work in the great campaigner, Ludovic Kennedy
Truth To Tell: The Collected Writings of Ludovic Kennedy Bantam Press, pounds 16.99
Fascinated, like the rest of us, by sensational court-room drama, Ludovic Kennedy attended every day of the trial of Stephen Ward, the unfortunate doctor caught up in the Profumo-Keeler scandal and who was mysteriously charged with living on immoral earnings. After the judge's summing up, the unfortunate Ward, possibly overwhelmed by the miserable injustice of his trial, went home to take an overdose.
Unaware of this, Kennedy attended the Old Bailey the next morning. 'When I went through the swing door of Court No 1 . . . the policeman on duty said to me: 'And what flowers will you be sending along?' I have always believed in life that when someone says something incomprehensible, it usually saves time and energy to pretend one understands. 'Oh, roses, I expect,' I said and went towards my seat. It was not until I had been there five or ten minutes that I heard the news.'
This is unmistakably the voice of the old-fashioned English gent - witty, patronising, detached and faintly egotistical. It is the voice of unconscious superiority and it is absolutely at odds with the writer's instinct actually to understand. It is perhaps no coincidence that Ludovic Kennedy's recent autobiography was called On My Way to the Club.
This voice breaks in at moments throughout these collected writings - in his disdain for vulgar Americans, for example, or in his faintly misogynistic descriptions of Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler - 'any little shop girl'. It can also be the voice of prejudice; almost the only Americans that Kennedy doesn't find funny and foolish in this selection from his book Very Lovely People are those that are black.
But the most persistent and most interesting voice in this book is the one that speaks not with the tastes of a clubman but with a gout de concierge.
Kennedy is a master of nasty detail. In retrospect it seems that most of this chosen collection of writing is upsetting; there are naval disasters, naval atrocities, the horrors of 10 Rillington Place told in the most unforgettable forensic detail, the sickening kidnap of the Linbergh baby with the keenly described anguish of all concerned, the nausea of capital punishment and a distressing piece on vivisection.
Even the fiction - an early play and some short stories - is about murder, sexual betrayal, a little boy drowning his baby sister and a man falsely accused of having bad breath. Isn't there a touch of tabloid taste in all this? However, it must be said that, tabloid tastes or no, Ludovic Kennedy has been an eloquent campaigner against the evil of capital punishment and a very influential voice against many shameful miscarriages of justice in England. The passion that he brought to these causes is unmistakable throughout these writings.
It may be less obvious from this collection, perhaps because of his modesty, how centrally important his role has been in changing public opinion on major issues of freedom and justice. Had he been a less popular writer, had he been less eminently readable, he might have been a less successful campaigner.
Very few journalists could write with Kennedy's authority the piece on 'Reforming the English Criminal Justice System', published here for the first time and well worth reading.
Other pieces on religion and euthanasia seem a little slight for such a collection. But as a writer of true life detective stories and court-room drama, with his elegant control of narrative and his subtle understanding of motives, Kennedy makes compulsive reading.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 27, 1991 | Comments (0)
Why men won't take feminism
My long-dead father's favourite book was Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, though I never knew why. Recently I think I have begun to understand.
Whenever he felt oppressed by civilised life, and particularly when he felt oppressed by civilising women, Huckleberry Finn 'lit out'. He would simply take to the river and run away from decency and gentility: every reader, man or woman, who has any fellow feeling at all, will understand why.
I'm convinced that the temptation to light out exists for all men in a way it doesn't seem to exist for all women. To put it another way, the veneer of civilisation - of respectable family life and responsible self-denial - is very thin with many men, as any feminist will tell you.
It might seem logical, then, to try not to push men to such a point that they feel like lighting out in large numbers. Yet that is what women seem to me to be doing. All around me there seem to be men who are cracking, who are at last very angry. And what is making them angry, and angry enough to admit it however sexist it may be, is the complaining of women. Decent, clever men who for 20 years have felt respect for women are suddenly suspecting that it might have been misplaced.
They have had enough of pretending that women are interesting when they aren't. They have had enough of women having things both ways. They have had enough of women's cries of unfairness: women have indeed had a very bad deal, but that does not mean that everything is men's fault. Nor can any one man be expected to expiate for all the evils of late capitalist democratic life, or of human endocrinology. Men have had enough of watching their words in case some frivolous and half-educated woman calls them sexist, especially when they have spent 20 years washing up for Women's Liberation.
In the past few days we have had the Washington sexual harassment hearing, the publication of Germaine Greer's angry book about the menopause and the penultimate episode of the controversial TV drama The Men's Room - the title comes from the sneering comment of a young feminist that ours is not so much a men's world as a men's room. Above all the interesting noises provoked by these things is the ugly noise of an upsurge of whining from women.
Of course serious sexual harassment is horrible - I feel terribly angry to this day about my own experience of it - but dirty talk from men , rather like being called Miz not Miss, is not usually very important. One of the nicest men I've ever worked with, an uncouth Australian hack, used to say to me in broad Ocker every morning when I arrived, ' My love, I think we should lock loins immediately'. Only a prig could have objected.
It is sad to grow old and lose any sexual power and beauty one might have had. But it is not men's fault, it is nature's, that, as King Lear said, 'age is unnecessary'. Yet one of the stronger impressions of Germaine Greer's book on this subject is an angry rant against mean men. Greer's furious animosity against intrusive male doctors, based on a tiny grain of truth, becomes truly absurd. What can be the response to all this of those thousands of male doctors, including my own gynaecologist, who have given their lives to relieving women's suffering as best they can? And what can be the response of men who also lose power and grow old?
Feminists have been talking for some time of a male backlash against them.
I don't think we've seen anything yet, but I suspect we are just about to.
And I'm afraid what we will see is men not lashing out but lighting out altogether.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 20, 1991 | Comments (0)
Books: Interview - Robert McCrum
Publishing one thing and writing another - Minette Marrin meets publisher and author Robert McCrum
The Cantonese have a useful expression for someone who knows how to mould the world to his own wishes, and this description fits Robert McCrum, the writer and publisher. He is, as the Chinese would say, a 'world boy'; it means knowing how to do what you want.
Robert McCrum rose, almost without trace, from a quiet academic background and an unexciting minor public school, to become one of the brightest boys in publishing in the Eighties. From Chatto and Windus he won a prize which sent him for a time to the fierce world of New York publishing, to Farrar Strauss, Giroux; on his return, when Faber poached him from Chatto, they actually had to pay a transfer fee for him.
McCrum transformed the Faber fiction list, with both new British writers and foreign authors, into its current classy and slightly cultish style and he is probably part of the reason why, in the Eighties, publishing in this country started to seem sexy and foreign fiction - Kundera, Vargas Llosa, Andre Brink - began to sell well.
Meanwhile, McCrum was also writing his own novels; his first was published in 1980, when he was 26. While working full time for Faber, he produced three novels in six years. His thriller, In a Secret State, was made into an expensive BBC series, starring Frank Finlay and Natasha Richardson.
With the same apparent ease - and with the same full time job - McCrum turned to documentaries: his extremely ambitious series, The Story of English, which he conceived and wrote, took him all round the world in pursuit of exotic forms of English, and finally won an Emmy in 1987. The book of the film became a best seller. Somewhere along the way he brought out a few children's books and his youthful marriage to the writer Olivia Timbs came to an end. He is now publishing his fourth novel.
Even a world boy cannot have so much fun without making a few enemies, and there are those who think he is arrogant and smug. He can certainly be dismissive and there is an unmistakeable ruthless streak in him; even 10 years ago, when extremely young and not so used to calling for Sancerre and being kissed by Eleanor at L'Escargot, the traces of killer instinct were there.
He would agree. He even once admitted that he always made a point of trying to find someone's Achilles' heel.
However, even his detractors would have to admit he is both fun and a delightful friend. He is charming, in a particularly witty, self deprecating, boyish English way - the cost of which is said sometimes to be an underdeveloped heart and which is so extremely English. But Robert McCrum is not entirely English. McCrum is a Northern Irish name; in Northern Ireland it has very strong Scottish, Protestant, mill owning reverberations.
That is what his forbears were - rich Northern Irish industrialists, who by the end of the First World War were ruined, the last of the fortune squandered at Monte Carlo. The family saga is filled with curious, almost mythic incident - McCrum's great grandfather invented the penalty kick in the 1890s, for instance. But after the fall his grandparents settled in Britain and the distressing family history was not discussed.
So it came as an enormous shock to Robert McCrum to find in Northern Ireland a model village just outside Armagh, in what's now bandit country, built in the 1870s by his great great grandfather Robert McCrum, with a McCrum Institute for the workers and, not far away, the family's great house, now turned into a mental home. 'I was completely stunned. And the idea of the big house gone to rack and ruin, which has finally become a lunatic asylum, seemed to me a metaphor for Northern Ireland. And that was the beginning of my new book.' It was also, with the economy of the successful, the basis of a BBC television documentary called In the Blood.
The curious thing about his new novel, Mainland, is that it is a plain tale, written in plain, clear, straightforward prose. Yet for 20 years we've seen every kind of self-consciousness and tricksiness in the novel, and Robert McCrum has been important in promoting this kind of fiction. But his novel shows no sign of these influences. 'I think it's preference, really. My last novel, The Fabulous Englishman, did have quite a lot of tricks in it. I was very conscious of trying to tell a story in this book. I wanted it to be really conventional. I put a very high price on clarity. I want prose to be like a pane of glass . . .
Narrative is very difficult. I can think of quite a lot of very well-known, successful writers, who don't understand narrative. At least two writers on the Booker Prize shortlist for instance,' he said, laughing.
Almost every novel on the Booker shortlist, and also his own, are set outside England. Would he agree that it would be unusual for an English author to write a good literary novel about England? 'Yes. And the people who do, like Margaret Drabble, often get into difficulties.' What about her sister, A. S. Byatt? Is that why she has had to find another country in the past? McCrum naughtily quoted an unkind remark about her: 'a very typical Englishwoman - she's been educated beyond her intelligence'.
I persisted in thinking that it's odd that he has deliberately produced a straightforward, even (one might say) unsophisticated narrative, when he is so very much part of the experimental and tricksy literary world. 'Well, I work for Faber and Faber, which has always been modernist, post-modernist and avant-garde. So my job is to represent an avant-garde literary consciousness, if that's possible. And of course there are literary fashions.
'When I first started at Faber, everyone was writing like Ian McEwen, then everyone was writing like Marquez and Rushdie and now Paul Auster's very influential. As an editor you are kind of conduit from the wider world. As a writer I think I know what good writing is; the writers I admire are the writers who know what they're about.' Would he publish himself? He laughed: 'If I were to publish myself, I'd have to make myself a very large offer.'
It's never clear why anyone is driven to write, especially someone with plenty of other options and the call of the world in his ears. McCrum spoke about writing as a way of making sense of life, or as a kind of compulsion.
Perhaps he was most revealing when talking about Graham Greene, with whom he feels a lot of affinities. Greene once wrote that every writer has a splinter of ice in his heart. Robert McCrum smiled. 'Yes, I don't have any difficulty with that - for a writer, for a book, anything goes.'
He went on, only partly teasing: 'And then there is the thrill of betrayal.
You asked eariler about making the world up on your own terms. Well, betrayal is the most wilful, self assertive, arrogant, narcissistic thing you can do and it's completely gripping . . . All relationships are about power, and skilful betrayal, successful betrayal is about the exercise of power. Never, ever trust a writer.' He was smiling but he wasn't joking.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 06, 1991 | Comments (0)
When it's mad not to interfere with nature
'DID you know,' a psychiatrist asked at a dinner party last week, 'that if you have a manic depressive parent you have a 35 per cent chance of being one yourself?' 'What if you have two?' I asked sadly, thinking of my own family, but not thinking of the other guests. 'Would it be 70 per cent?' An embarrassed silence followed. 'No hope,' said the psychiatrist finally, laughing and trying to make a joke.
But, as it happens, there is some hope, at last. With recent developments in genetics, it is now known that there is an important, genetic factor in all kinds of mental illness, and one that can be identified. The hope is that, in the long run, there may be some way of stepping off the miserable, biologically-ordained treadmill to which so many people are condemned by their own genes.
You might think that this latest example of the awe-inspiring progress of science was something that all should celebrate. Yet, astonishingly, it meets with great opposition - as do many other major scientific discoveries.
The development of the relief of suffering, in this century alone, is moving to contemplate. In microbiology and genetic research this progress is so remarkable that you read about it in the ordinary news.
There is, for example, the famous genome project, the mapping of the human genetic code. There are the discoveries, if tentative, of the genetic basis for a surprisingly large number of mental illnesses, including manic depression, schizophrenia and, recently, alcoholism.
Not long ago an American scientist announced that he had found small but significant differences between the brains of homosexual men and heterosexual men. Last week a genetic explanation for dyslexia was found.
Scientists actually talk about the New Genetics.
Such dazzling discoveries - provisional and crude though they still may be regularly encounter fear and resistance. People begin to hold forth about the dangers of interfering with nature, the sanctity of human life, the wickedness of politicians. And this is before anybody has even suggested snipping schizophrenic bits out of anybody.
For example, in an article in Monday's Daily Telegraph discussing the ethical problems raised by genetics, Dr Myles Harris wrote with feeling of 'the dangers that lie ahead as computers pursue the soul'. In much the same spirit he issued a warning last year about the moral implications of using a genetically engineered growth hormone that might make old people healthier and stronger, perhaps even happier.
As a member of a family with various (recently recognised) genetic illnesses, this makes me furious. The hope that serious genetic problems, with all the misery they bring, may perhaps one day be controllable is to me a great comfort.
I realise that all these discoveries are still very primitive. At a 1989 conference I attended at the Institute of Psychiatry, on the New Genetics, scientists made it clear that no one is yet close to being able, in layman's terms, to snip out the bad genetic bits.
These issues are scientifically very complex; it is known, for instance, that manic depression is often closely linked with creativity. One might be the price of the other, as folklore has long suggested. There will certainly, as always, be some ugly choices to be made. But who, seeing the lifelong misery of someone tormented by madness, would not be bold enough to wish for choice? Such choices may come in my grandchildren's time.
They may even, with the exponential growth in genetic discovery, come in my children's time.
I feel enormously grateful to the inspired and dedicated people who have given their working lives to offering this kind of hope. And I feel, I confess, a trace of contempt for those morally timid and scientifically illiterate people - I am not referring to Dr Harris - who dismiss these hopes without further thought.
Of course, genetic research and genetic engineering cast up terrible possibilities, and terrible memories, too. This is no reason to condemn them out of hand. Science always offers power both for good and for evil. What particularly angers me is the nave and sentimental view that these developments, at the sharp end of science, are somehow against nature.
Humankind has never accepted what nature (or God) has sent. Our history is full of attempts to change nature - to bring more rain, to make women more fertile, to fend off plagues, to ease the pain in the dentist's chair.
It is part of nature that humans try to change their lot. Sacrifices and prayer alike were attempts to interfere with nature or God's will; science has followed, somewhat more efficiently.
Discussing the dilemmas ahead, Myles Harris asked in his article, as so many people tend to do, 'Who are we to judge?' There is only one response to that, and I believe it is a clinching argument: who else is there?
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, October 03, 1991 | Comments (0)
